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MongoDB: From early adopter to mainstream enterprise

One of the best things about industry innovation right now is that virtually none of the best technology is emerging from the bowels of some corporate R&D department. It’s coming from real companies solving real problems of scale, among other things, and often from web companies like Google and Twitter. Even better, this “web” technology is now finding its way into the enterprise, something that 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman captures in a recent interview with InfoWorld:

Our first customers were from the Web 2.0 and startup world. That was…back in 2009, so you have folks like Shutterfly or Craigslist or Foursquare using MongoDB. Then a year later we saw bigger enterprises using the product, folks like a Intellisponse or O2 or Disney or eBay. And now even at the enterprise level we’re getting beyond the early-adopter phase. In 2012 the biggest trend I saw in terms of adoption was financial services, where banks and other financial firms were adopting MongoDB and NoSQL in general quite widely. They use it for new projects. They have all this legacy stuff, of course, but the majority of them are now NoSQL for at least some percentage of their new projects. There are some organizations who are saying: This is our default way to build apps.

When pressed that this “default” must solely be for “web apps,” Merriman pushed back:

[I]n MongoDB there’s nothing that’s that specific to Web apps. Conceptually, it’s a general-purpose database. True, the early adopters were from the Web, But I think people use it for everything: for content management systems, for personalization systems, for streaming mobile. They use it for Web, but also for accounting stuff and on the offline analytic side, where you have large repositories of historical data. It’s pretty broad.

At 10gen we feel confident that document databases are the future of the database market, given their scalability, flexibility, and ease-of-use. If your developers can be up and productive with MongoDB in minutes rather than days or weeks, and if the database supports a wide array of use cases, it’s going to become difficult not to be convinced to try it.